Week 5 Video 13: Summary of Week 5

What are the determinants of a happy and fulfilling life?
This is surely one of life’s biggest questions, and a question that has interested many of our ancestors. Buddha famously gave up his kingdom in search of happiness. Several Greek philosophers (from Aristotle to Epicurus and Plato to Socrates) had their own views on what it takes to be happy. And of course, we all have our own theories about happiness too.
How valid are our theories?
Until recently, if you wished for an answer to this question, you would've been forced to base it on discussions with spiritual leaders. Or, if you were lucky, you could've based it on late-night (and perhaps intoxicant-fueled) conversations with friends and family. Happily, all that has changed now. Over the past decade-and-a-half, scientists have gotten into the act big time. We now have a pretty good idea of what it takes to lead a happy and fulfilling life.
This course, based on the award-winning class offered both at the Indian School of Business and at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, developed by Prof. Raj Raghunathan (aka "Dr. Happy-smarts") draws content from a variety of fields, including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral decision theory to offer a tested and practical recipe for leading a life of happiness and fulfillment.
Although not mandatory, reading Prof. Raj's forthcoming book, titled If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? can help you review and assimilate the material covered in this book at your leisure.
For Coursera learners alone, the hardcover version of the book is available for a deep discount of 50%, plus shipping and handling. You can order the hardcover for 50% off by writing to Aaron at: Aaron@800ceoread.com. Please mention that you are a student of the "coursera happiness course" in your email.
The course will feature guest appearances by several well-known thought leaders, including:
- Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational and, soon to be released, Irrationally Yours),
- Ed Diener (“Dr. Happiness”),
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow),
By taking this course, you will discover the answers to questions such as:
- Why aren’t the smart-and-the-successful as happy as they could—or should—be
- What are the “7 Deadly Happiness Sins” that even the smart and the successful commit?, and
- What are the “7 Habits of the Highly Happy” and how can you implement them in your life?
By the end of the course, I expect students who have been diligent with the lectures and exercises to not just gain a deeper understanding of the science of happiness, but to also be significantly happier.

教学方

Dr. Rajagopal Raghunathan

脚本

[MUSIC] >> [FOREIGN] My friend. Whenever I have a headache, I follow the instructions on the medicine bottle fully. I take two pills and I keep the children away, just like the bottle says. [SOUND] >> [LAUGH] >> Welcome back. In this video, I want to summarize everything that we discussed this week. We began the week, as you might remember, with the fifth deadly happiness sin, which is distrusting others. As we saw from the work of John Halliwell and others, trust is a huge determinant of happiness, when you trust others, you're happier, and when you don't trust others, you are less happy. What's also true are the following two facts. Others are more trustworthy than we particularly give them credit. We saw this through the wallet drop experiments that Professor Halliwell summarized for us. And second, when we trust others, they act in a trustworthy fashion because of the release of oxytocin. What these three facts suggest is that if we are smart about being happy, we would trust others more than we currently do. I say this on the basis of defining that the average person is less trusting of others than he, or she should be. Now, if it turns out you are more activity calibrated than the average person is in how much you trust others, good for you, great. You're likely to be a much happier person as a result. However, if you found out from the trust scale that you filled out, that your less trusting than would be optimal, that is that your trust levels are at the average score or below, you could use the three strategies that I outlined in exercising Smart Trust, the 5th Habit of the Highly Happy, in order to steer yourself towards the direction of becoming more trusting. The first of these three strategies involves recognizing the fact that I've already mentioned, that people are on average more trustworthy than we give them credit. Particularly, when you have distrusted them. Keeping this fact in mind should help you be a little more proactively trusting of others. The second strategy involves bringing to mind two major hidden benefits of proactive trust. One, increasing the odds of embedding yourself in a web of trustworthy relationships, which, for obvious reasons, is going to enhance your happiness levels. And, two, contributing to society by enhancing interpersonal trust, which is also going to enhance your happiness levels because, as we saw in week three, we all have a desire to contribute to others' well-being. The third and final strategy involves things that one could do to mitigate the pain from being cheated. When you trust others more, you're bound to get cheated more often. There simply isn't any way around this. And because being cheated hurts there's a good chance that trusting others can have a boomerang effect, whereby you go back to being just as distrusting as you were earlier or worse, become even more distrusting. And that would be a shame, of course. So here are three things you could do to mitigate the pain from being cheated. First, recognize, at least in the material realm, that you and I are much better off than most others in the world. So you and I, in other words, can stomach being cheated much more than can, say, a poor farmer in Central African republic, or a poor rickshaw driver in Cambodia. I'm not saying that those that are materially well off should actively go looking for opportunities to get cheated. I'm just pointing out that being cheated isn't as significantly negative for us than it is for most others. The mere recognition of this fact, I have found, helps me cope with the pain of being cheated. Second, I have found that making a resolution to hold those who cheat me accountable for their actions, helps me deal with the pain of being cheated. Holding others accountable, of course, doesn't mean feeling morally superior to them, or wanting to take revenge on them. Rather, it means doing what one can to set things right so that everybody can be happier. Having a heartfelt conversation with the person who I think has violated my trust, I have found, helps me deal with the pain of being cheated mostly by helping me recognize that what I consider to be a violation of trust, sometimes, even sometimes often actually, turns out to be a simple case of miscommunication. Finally, the practice of forgiveness too can help with the pain of being cheated. As I mentioned earlier, studies have shown that forgiveness improves both trust in others and also improves happiness levels, which is why forgiveness is the fifth happiness exercise. In the latter half of the week, we moved on to the sixth deadly happiness sin, the sin of distrusting life. Distrusting life means believing that bad things are going to happen and that life by nature is maligned rather than benign. And this leads to the attitude of seeing your glass as half empty rather than half full. And such a negative belief about life, as you can easily imagine, deflates happiness levels as a lot of studies on pessimism and helplessness have shown. How can you avoid the sixth deadly happiness sin? By adopting the sixth habit of the highly happy, which is the dispassionate pursuit of passion. Dispassionate pursuit of passion involves having preferences for certain outcomes over others before the outcomes occur so that you have goals in life and you know what it is that you wanna pursue. But then once an outcome has occurred, not judging it as good or bad, to the extent that it can, but rather availing of the new opportunities that arise, because of these outcomes. Dispassionate pursuit of passion enhances happiness levels for several reasons. It eliminates or at least mitigates the misery and the suffering that typically follow the appearance of a negative outcome. When one doesn't judge an outcome as negative, one naturally suffers less. It also allows one to turn one's attention to the new opportunities that the outcome trigger, and this makes one more capable of learning and growing, which in turn improves future happiness levels. And finally, it makes one more resilient, optimistic and positive about life, rather than miserable and pessimistic. So, from a variety of perspectives, the dispassionate pursuit of passion is a much better approach than is the approach that most of us typically tend to take, which is the approach of judging outcomes both before and after they've occurred. So an approach that I'll label the obsessive pursuit of passion. I outlined 3 strategies for adopting the dispassionate pursuit of passion. The first one was to reflect on past negative events to realize that if those events could have turned out positive in retrospect, then the present negative events could as well in the future. And this realization can help mitigate the knee-jerk tendency to judge certain outcomes as negative. The second strategy involves actively looking for reasons to be grateful even when something negative happens, since doing so is likely to make one look for the opportunities that arise as a result of these negative outcomes. This, in turn, helps growth and learning. The final strategy involves maintaining a daily record of these small negative events that later turned out to yield or trigger positive consequences, something that I call three good things with a twist, which was the happiness exercise first week. Hopefully you are well on your way to completing this exercise and that you find it to be not just interesting but also useful. That wraps up everything that we covered this week, and to end this week I'm going to leave you with a short video clip in which Dan Ariely, the professor from Duke University, is going to tell us about how he now views a hugely negative event that happened to him as a teenager. As you may know, he sustained burns to 70% of his body when he was just 18 and had to undergo hospitalization for several years after it. Much of this period was intensely painful, and to this day actually Dan suffers from those burns. But, as you will hear Dan say, even such a hugely negative event can trigger some positive consequences. As you will hear Dan say, the accident may not have made him a happier person in the way that some of us, some of the time, may think about happiness as a superficial kind of giggly haha-kind of way, but it's definitely enriched his life and made it more interesting and meaningful. Hopefully, as you hear Dan speak, you will be inspired to overcome the setbacks you may be currently facing and emerge stronger from that. That said, however, I am by no means trying to suggest that everyone can or should be able to overcome whatever negative outcomes that they face. After Dan finishes speaking, the video will end, so let me wave goodbye to you right now. See you bright and early next week. >> Hello. I think we had this discussion a while ago, you and I, about what is the nature of happiness, and how much is happiness about fulfillment, and duty, and feeling connected and understanding, and so on. And I think I feel much more of that. I feel it gave me a sense of purpose and mission. Let's just think about something simple. Somebody with a horrific accident writes me and they tell me about how their life is and of course it's terrible, right? It's terrible to know about that. And then they asked me some questions, and I have too you know take time and think about this and empathize and try to remember things that happen in my past and try to figure out what is the right approach and, and everything about it is painful memories and thoughts and realization of how suffering there is. But at the same time I also get to help a little bit or at least to feel that I'm helping a little bit, and that gives me some kind of sense of satisfaction and connection and so on. So it's a very, lots of changes because of it. They're not about the happiness that I think people usually think about, but they are about bigger sense of connection, gratitude, and obligation. I was injured when I was in Israel, and last summer when I was there I was driving around trying to figure out how much money I owed the health care system. It's socialized medicine, but even if it's not socialized medicine, I get kind of these mental calculus of what do I owe, right? So if you think about being so long in hospital, it was a huge expense for the healthcare system and I was kind of contemplating what do I owe, how do I pay back, how does this work out so? Anyway, so certainly enriching, certainly complex. Enriching in a very interesting ways. [MUSIC]